During the last two decades, social entrepreneurship (hereafter SE) has gained considerable attention from academia and governments for the innovativeness in treating complex social problems, tresspassing boundaries between... [ view full abstract ]
During the last two decades, social entrepreneurship (hereafter SE) has gained considerable attention from academia and governments for the innovativeness in treating complex social problems, tresspassing boundaries between private and public sector practices and developing strategies of multiple, i.e. economic, social, environmental and cultural value creation (Bacq and Janssen, 2011; Chell et al., 2010; Jonker, 2012; Santos et al., 2015). The multiple public values that social business creates worldwide (Fotheringham and Saunders, 2014; Peredo and Chrisman, 2006; Seddon et al., 2014) implies the necessity of studying the factors for their developing. In this paper we avoid a widely used term of “social enterprise“ because in Lithuania, which is the context of our study, it is an official translation of a legal form of an enterprise aimed at work integration of the socially disadvantaged which does not necessarily follow social mission and therefore is called de jure social enterprise in contrast to de facto enterprises which strive for social mission firstly (Pučėtaitė et al., 2015).
One research direction in SE is intentions of social entrepreneurs and their character traits, which heavily draws on Mair and Noboa‘s (2006) framework of individual traits that can predict social entrepreneurial intentions. Two of these are ethical concepts (empathy and moral judgement), the other two are psychological (self-efficacy and perceived presence of social support). Bacq et al. (2016) suggest that further research could investigate the role that different levels of empathy and moral judgement in detecting and seizing the opportunity play. Based on that, we go further and ask a research question how ethical virtues and moral judgements motivate individuals to engage in SE and make social impact.
The empirical data come from two periods. One data set was collected through 15 interviews with social entrepreneurs in the research project on the impact of organizational ethics on transformation of organizational innovativeness to sustainable innovation financed by European Social Fund in 2014-2015. The content analysis of the interviews indicate that from ethical and psychological perspectives, the intentions and motives range from self-interest, desire for self-realisation, empathy to similar (suffering) people to external public incentives. The impacts they reported to be creating included cherishing ethnicity and national culture, creating new products for healthier, educated community/society and safety of society. Yet, the interviews did not address the ways and ethical dimension of seizing the opportunity or making social impact. This will be done in in-depth interviews with social entrepreneurs from November 2017 to February 2018 in a research project on measuring social impact of social enterprises supported by Research Council of Lithuania. During the period between the projects, the public awareness about social business became much stronger. Besides, EU funding is allocated for development of the ecosystem for social enterprises in 2018-2020. This may have sparkled stronger intentions to develop social business or understanding of the impact social entrepreneurs make may have had qualitative changes. Based on the findings we expect to propose sets of ethical virtues and paths of moral judgements for developing business with social impact.
